In front of more than 100 community members inside a conference room at the Wind River Hotel and Casino, tribal housing officials discussed upcoming housing projects and talked about a goal to increase the home ownership rate of their tribal members. But, they said, challenges like securing federal funding, tight budgets, long wait lists, a young population, neglect by tenants and homes contaminated by meth could slow or complicate progress. Others who have housing can’t afford, or haven’t connected to, utility services.

“I know housing is a crisis here on the reservation; there’s not enough. I know that there’s things happening and moving in that direction to increase housing,” said panelist Sarah Lucas, co-founder of local ministry Foundations for Nations. “But what we’ve come to realize, my husband and I, is that those that do have housing ... they have not been able to afford to maintain the maintenance of the homes.”

Other panel members discussed available mortgage assistance programs, with others discussing homelessness in the area, which one advocate, Charles Aragon, patient advocate for SageWest HealthCare, said is often unseen or hard to count among tribal members because many who don’t have permanent housing live “couch to couch, night to night” instead of on the streets.

At the same time, many tribal members have for years crammed multiple families or generations into a single family home.

“When we talk about overcrowding, for many of us, that’s nothing new,” said Patrick Goggles, executive director of Northern Arapaho Tribal Housing. “That’s just how our culture is; we take people in. ... If you’re not overcrowded, you’re the exception. The rule of thumb is we’re overcrowded.”

A growing population

Goggles said the Northern Arapaho need 600 units, from affordable rentals to elder housing to units for veterans, to fulfill the tribe’s need. It currently has an inventory of 235 units.

And with 85 percent of the tribe’s population 30 years old or younger, he said those needs won’t be going away.

“We have a growing population,” Goggles said. “We have this wave coming at us.”

The age crunch comes as federal allocations to U.S. tribes for housing haven’t grown — and has been cut or proposed to shrink — since the mid-1990s, said both Goggles and Charles Washakie, executive director of the Eastern Shoshone Housing Authority.

Washakie said that shows why it’s important for tribal members to complete the upcoming census, since a higher count of members means more federal funding for the tribes.

Further complicating the problem for the tribes, Goggles and Washakie explained, is a confusing patchwork of land ownership status within the reservation’s boundaries and voluminous and cumbersome application requirements for federal dollars.

But one recent success for the Northern Arapaho was a nearly $5 million award from the federal government, Goggles said. That money will be used to build 20 affordable housing units in the Great Plains area of Arapahoe called Chief Black Coal Housing.

Encouraging ownership

For Washakie, pushing home ownership is one way to address the housing crisis among the Eastern Shoshone. He said the tribe would start a program to work with renters — even those with no or poor credit — to convert them to homeowners eventually.

“I believe our people should have their own homes (to) have something to pass to their grandkids,” he said.

While the tribe hasn’t built any new housing units since 1996, Washakie said it has been busy updating its units, with new metal roofs, for example. But what doesn’t help is when tenants trash or don’t maintain their homes, leaving the tribe to pay for restoration, which has strained Washakie’s budget.

That’s why Washakie said he wants to steer the tribe — which has a waiting list of about 70 people needing housing — away from renting out its units and toward encouraging home ownership.

In addition to a lack of maintenance, many homes owned by both tribes are increasingly contaminated by meth, Washakie said. Cleaning up those homes can cost up to $20,000, and some homes are so contaminated that they have to be condemned.

And the federal government mandates testing and cleaning but doesn’t provide funding for that, Washakie said.

“We don’t have the money for that.”

Many don’t have experience buying a home or know the available resources for first-time buyers. To help with that, Washakie said the Wind River Development fund and two Wind River tribes will start offering home ownership and buying classes.

The tribe even purchased land in 2018 to begin building homes, transitional housing and hopefully a community center at the site of an old rodeo grounds in Fort Washakie, Washakie said.

“I’ve got one more project with rentals, and after that we’re going after home ownership. I wish I had good news to tell you guys, but the good news is that we’re going to start building homes. We’re going to move ahead.”